Reminder—Third Party Gmail Apps Can Read Your Emails, "Allow" Carefully!

Reminder—If you've forgotten about any Google app after using it once a few years ago, be careful, it may still have access to your private emails.

When it comes to privacy on social media, we usually point fingers at Facebook for enabling third-party app developers to access users personal information—even with users' consent.

But Facebook is not alone.

Google also has a ton of information about you and this massive pool of data can be accessed by third-party apps you connect to, using its single sign-on service.

Though Google has much stricter privacy policies about what developers can do with your data, the company still enables them to ask for complete access of your Google account, including the content of your emails and contacts.

The entire Facebook's Cambridge Analytica privacy saga highlights how crucial it is to keep track of the apps you have connected to your social media accounts and permitted to access your data.

Last year, Google itself promised to stop scanning the inboxes of Gmail users for data-driven advertisements, but the company reportedly is still giving outside app developers the ability to snoop through hundreds of millions of private Gmail messages that flow through the email service on a regular basis.

A new report by the WSJ yesterday highlighted how Gmail's ambiguous app permissions have left your personal emails vulnerable to hundreds of third-party developers who can read nearly every detail from your most sensitive emails, including the recipient's e-mail id, timestamps, the entire email body.

This is because Google allows third-party app developers to build services that work with its Gmail platform, like "email-based services," "shopping price comparisons," and "automated travel-itinerary planners," and millions of users who have signed up for any of such services are at risk of having their private messages read by outside app developers and their employees.

Obviously, such apps get consent from users to access their inboxes as part of the opt-in process, but the news that third-party app developers could read your emails, which usually contains sensitive data, may come as a surprise to users who did not understand what they signed up for.

A Google spokesperson told the publication that the company examines all outside app developers before giving access to its service and if it "ever run into areas where disclosures and practices are unclear, Google takes quick action with the developer."

However, unlike Facebook's Cambridge Analytica case, there's no evidence of any third-party Gmail add-on developer has misused your data, just being their ability to view and read private emails, which itself seems like a privacy nightmare.

How to Check and Remove Third-Party Apps Access with Your Gmail Inbox

It is time to review all the third-party apps which have access to your Gmail inbox and revoke access if you find any of them untrustworthy or unnecessary, as your email data is much more sensitive than your data on any other social media platform.

This is the only precaution you can take right now. Here's how to do it:

• Head on to your Google's "My Account" page and log in with your Gmail credentials if you have not already.
• Once logged in, you will be able to see and review all the third-party apps you have given access to your Google accounts, including Gmail.
• Apps with access to your Gmail inbox will have a label called "Has access to Gmail" beneath its entry.
• Since Google currently does not provide a way to get rid of just the Gmail access, you can completely disable that app's access by hitting the "Remove Access" button.

You can also share your feedback with the tech giant if you find any site or app getting unnecessary permission to your Google account.

 

by Mohit Kumar

Attacks Against LTE Network Protocol

Attacks Against LTE Network Protocol

If your mobile carrier offers LTE, also known as the 4G network, you need to beware as your network communication can be hijacked remotely.

A team of researchers has discovered some critical weaknesses in the ubiquitous LTE mobile device standard that could allow sophisticated hackers to spy on users' cellular networks, modify the contents of their communications, and even can re-route them to malicious or phishing websites.

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is the latest mobile telephony standard used by billions of people designed to bring many security improvements over the predecessor standard known as Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications.

However, multiple security flaws have been discovered over the past few years, allowing attackers to intercept user's communications, spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and knock devices entirely offline.

4G LTE Network Vulnerabilities.

Now, security researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and New York University Abu Dhabi have developed three novel attacks against LTE technology that allowed them to map users' identity, fingerprint the websites they visit and redirect them to malicious websites by tampering with DNS lookups.

All three attacks, explained by researchers on a dedicated website, abuse the data link layer, also known as Layer Two, of the ubiquitous LTE network.

The data link layer lies on top of the physical channel, which maintains the wireless communication between the users and the network. It is responsible for organizing how multiple users access resources on the network, helping to correct transmission errors, and protecting data through encryption.

Out of three, identity mapping and website fingerprinting developed by the researchers are passive attacks, in which a spy listens to what data is passing between base stations and end users over the airwaves from the target's phone.

However, the third, DNS spoofing attack, dubbed "aLTEr" by the team, is an active attack, which allows an attacker to perform man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept communications and redirect the victim to a malicious website using DNS spoofing attacks.

What is aLTEr Attack? 

lte-network-hacking Since the data link layer of the LTE network is encrypted with AES-CTR but not integrity-protected, an attacker can modify the bits even within an encrypted data packet, which later decrypts to a related plaintext. "The aLTEr attack exploits the fact that LTE user data is encrypted in counter mode (AES-CTR) but not integrity protected, which allows us to modify the message payload: the encryption algorithm is malleable, and an adversary can modify a ciphertext into another ciphertext which later decrypts to a related plaintext," the researchers said in their paper.

In aLTEr attack, an attacker pretends to be a real cell tower to the victim, while at the same time also pretending to be the victim to the real network, and then intercepts the communications between the victim and the real network.

How aLTEr Attack Targets 4G LTE Networks?

As a proof-of-concept demonstration, the team showed how an active attacker could redirect DNS (domain name system) requests and then perform a DNS spoofing attack, causing the victim mobile device to use a malicious DNS server that eventually redirects the victim to a malicious site masquerading as Hotmail.

The researcher performed the aLTEr attack within a commercial network and commercial phone within their lab environment. To prevent unintended inference with the real network, the team used a shielding box to stabilize the radio layer.

Also, they set up two servers, their DNS server, and an HTTP server, to simulate how an attacker can redirect network connections. You can see the video demonstration to watch the aLTEr attack in action. The attack is dangerous, but it is difficult to perform in real-world scenarios. It also requires equipment (USRP), about $4,000 worth, to operate—something similar to IMSI catchers, Stingray, or DRTbox—and usually works within a 1-mile radius of the attacker.

However, for an intelligence agency or well-resourced, skilled attacker, abusing the attack is not trivial.

LTE Vulnerabilities Also Impact Forthcoming 5G Standard 

The above attacks are not restricted to only 4G.

Forthcoming 5G networks may also be vulnerable to these attacks, as the team said that although 5G supports authenticated encryption, the feature is not mandatory, which likely means most carriers do not intend to implement it, potentially making 5G vulnerable as well.

"The use of authenticated encryption would prevent the aLTEr attack, which can be achieved through the addition of message authentication codes to user plane packets," the researchers said.

"However, the current 5G specification does not require this security feature as mandatory, but leaves it as an optional configuration parameter."

What's Worse? LTE Network Flaws Can't be Patched Straightaway 

Since the attacks work by abusing an inherent design flaw of the LTE network, it cannot be patched, as it would require overhauling the entire LTE protocol.

 As part of its responsible disclosure, the team of four researchers—David Rupprecht, Katharina Kohls, Thorsten Holz, and Christina Pöpper—notified both the GSM Association and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project, along with other telephone companies, before going public with their findings.

In response to the attacks, the 3GPP group, which develops standards for the telecommunications industry, said that an update to the 5G specification might be complicated because carriers like Verizon and AT&T have already started implementing the 5G protocol.

How Can You Protect Against LTE Network Attacks? 

The simplest way to protect yourself from such LTE network attacks is to always look out for the secure HTTPS domain on your address bar.

The team suggests two exemplary countermeasures for all carriers:

1.) Update the specification: All carriers should band together to fix this issue by updating the specification to use an encryption protocol with authentication like AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305. However, the researchers believe this is likely not feasible in practice, as the implementation of all devices must be changed to do this, which will lead to a high financial and organizational effort, and most carriers will not bother to do that.

2.) Correct HTTPS configuration: Another solution would be for all websites to adopt the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) policy, which would act as an additional layer of protection, helping prevent the redirection of users to a malicious website. Besides the dedicated website, the team has also published a research paper [PDF] with all the technical details about the aLTEr attack. Full technical details of the attacks are due to be presented during the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy next May.

Swati Khandelwal

New 4G LTE Network Attacks Let Hackers Spy, Track, Spoof and Spam

Security researchers have discovered a set of severe vulnerabilities in 4G LTE protocol that could be exploited to spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and even knock devices entirely offline.

A new research paper [PDF] recently published by researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa details 10 new cyber attacks against the 4G LTE wireless data communications technology for mobile devices and data terminals.

The attacks exploit design weaknesses in three key protocol procedures of the 4G LTE network known as attach, detach, and paging.

Unlike many previous research, these aren't just theoretical attacks. The researchers employed a systematic model-based adversarial testing approach, which they called LTEInspector, and were able to test 8 of the 10 attacks in a real testbed using SIM cards from four large US carriers.

1. Authentication Synchronization Failure Attack
2. Traceability Attack
3. Numb Attack
4. Authentication Relay Attack
5. Detach/Downgrade Attack
6. Paging Channel Hijacking Attack
7. Stealthy Kicking-off Attack
8. Panic Attack
9. Energy Depletion Attack
10. Linkability Attack

Among the above-listed attacks, researchers consider an authentication relay attack is particularly worrying, as it lets an attacker connect to a 4G LTE network by impersonating a victim's phone number without any legitimate credentials.

This attack could not only allow a hacker to compromise the cellular network to read incoming and outgoing messages of the victims but also frame someone else for the crime.

"Through this attack the adversary can poison the location of the victim device in the core networks, thus allowing setting up a false alibi or planting fake evidence during a criminal investigation," the report said.

Other notable attacks reported by the researchers could allow attackers to obtain victim’s coarse-grained location information (linkability attack) and launch denial of service (DoS) attack against the device and take it offline (detach attack).

"Using LTEInspector, we obtained the intuition of an attack which enables an adversary to possibly hijack a cellular device’s paging channel with which it can not only stop notifications (e.g., call, SMS) to reach the device but also can inject fabricated messages resulting in multiple implications including energy depletion and activity profiling," the paper reads.

Using panic attack, attackers can create artificial chaos by broadcasting fake emergency messages about life-threatening attacks or riots to a large number of users in an area.

What's interesting about these attacks is that many of these can be carried out for $1,300 to $3,900 using relatively low-cost USRP devices available in the market.

Researchers have no plans to release the proof-of-concept code for these attacks until the flaws are fixed.

Although there are some possible defenses against these observed attacks, the researchers refrained from discussing one.

The paper reads: "retrospectively adding security into an existing protocol without breaking backward compatibility often yields band-aid-like-solutions which do not hold up under extreme scrutiny."

"It is also not clear, especially, for the authentication relay attack whether a defense exists that does not require major infrastructural or protocol overhaul," it adds. "A possibility is to employ a distance-bounding protocol; realization of such protocol is, however, rare in practice."

The vulnerabilities are most worrying that once again raise concerns about the security of the cell standards in the real world, potentially having an industry-wide impact.